XR argument is extinct!
IT’S a long time since I have seen a demonstration against the Vietnam War, because it is, well, over. In the same way you don’t often see marches protesting against the National Front because, as far as I know, that organisation is defunct. It’s even been a while since I’ve seen a ‘Britain out of the EU’ protest, probably because we have now left the EU.
But the London streets are full of noisy protests by people who think this country should bankrupt itself in the cause of preventing climate change, even though the Government has already decided to do exactly that.
My favourites are the women who caper about in spidery red outfits, now looking even more thrillingly exotic thanks to their facemasks. Then there are the ones who gather round hunks of broccoli, doing who knows what. And there are the people who glue their bottoms to the street.
Now that the Government’s wild over-reaction to Covid has squeezed the life out of London, they all do much less serious harm than they used to.
But the problem is that they have got what they want. Both the major parties, especially the Tories, have entirely swallowed the green pill. The Prime Minister and Greta Thunberg are as one.
Last week, as if to symbolise this, the majestic coal-fired power station at Ferrybridge in Yorkshire was actually blown up so it could never be used again. This makes no practical sense, and seems to be a sort of religious sacrifice. For, as its chimneys fell, many more bigger and dirtier new coal-fired power stations rose to replace it in China and India.
This fact makes the action quite meaningless – except in the amount of pain it will cause us when the National Grid goes wonky, as it will, the more it relies on wind and power sucked in from abroad.
By law, Britain is now committed to a series of similar colossal acts of economic self-harm, stretching over the next 30 years, in the confident belief that by doing so we will save the planet.
As someone who isn’t wholly convinced that they have this right, or that the measures they plan will do any good, I have now reached the stage when I no longer care. Arguing with zealots is a waste of energy, so I don’t bother.
By the time we are all freezing in unheated homes and stranded by power cuts and flat batteries, I shall be dead or in a care home, so I have decided to laugh at it. Because it will happen. In which case, if that is what you want, why now glue your buttocks to the road to protest, or engage in broccoli worship? Why do these things to demand what you already have?
You’d be far better off using the time and energy assembling a secret stock of firewood to see you through the chilly times to come.